The purpose of this email is to try to lay out a roadmap for solving, once and for all, the question of inactive Fedora Ambassadors.

GOALS OF IDENTIFYING INACTIVE AMBASSADORS:

(1) Housekeeping. All projects need to have their membership rosters pruned from time to time. In Ambassadors, this is particularly important because non-Fedora people might get in touch with Ambassadors, and if they don't receive a response, it looks like Fedora is ignorning them. Other sub-projects for which identifying inactive ambassadors are crucial is packaging. If someone drops off the face of the earth, their packages need to be given to a new owner.

How often are these pages currently updated? Is the process manual or automated, or a mixture of both?

(2) Give a more prominent location to the "list of ambassadors per country". That page should be the most visited page in all of Fedora Ambassadors. People who are trying to find out about Fedora should be visiting it, and Ambassadors who are looking for other Fedora folks near them should be visiting it.

We should have something on fedoraproject.org that says "are you interested in Fedora? Find a Fedora Ambassador near you to give you some information" and you type in your location, and it spits back a list of Ambassadors near you.

(3) In order for any of (2) to be successful, we need to make sure that the people who are listed as Ambassadors are actually paying attention to the Ambassadors part of Fedora. If someone is not, it doesn't mean that they are a bad person -- it just means that they don't want to have to deal with organizing events or asking questions from newbies to the project.

I wouldn't be offended if someone removed me from the Fedora Infrastructure group in FAS, because *I DON'T DO ANYTHING WITH FEDORA INFRASTRUCTURE*. It doesn't mean I'm a bad person or not a Fedora contributor, it just means that I don't participate in that part of Fedora.

HOW DO WE IDENTIFY ACTIVE AMBASSADORS?

We come up with a policy that is simple, and fair.

An active ambassador is someone who:

1) Has joined the group in FAS.
2) Reads and/or posts on fedora-ambassadors-list.
3) Has a useful, up-to-date personal page on the Fedora wiki.

And does one or more of:

* Attends or organizes an event once in a release cycle.
* Maintains a blog on Planet Fedora, with about one post per month.
* Participates on fedora-list or fedoraforum.org to help people w/ questions.
* Indicates their willingness to mentor and guide new contributors or new users.

+1

WHAT DO WE DO WITH INACTIVE AMBASSADORS?

If someone is inactive, we *DO NOT* kick them out of the ambassadors group in FAS, and we *DO NOT* remove them from fedora-ambassadors list.

But we should remove them from the "directory of Ambassadors sorted by country", which I argue again needs to be much more visible and useful, so that those inactive Ambassadors aren't being asked to do public-facing things.

When someone re-surfaces or has more time for Ambassadors, we put them back on the directory.

==================

Flame me.

--Max

But what do we do with inactive Ambassadors, who are inactive from a long time? Are they Ambassadors for ever??!!